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Fedora 11 Linux + ATI = Not Happening

So I downloaded and burned a copy of Fedora 11 Linux and found it won’t work at all on my Gateway laptop with the ATI built-in graphics card. The LiveCD wouldn’t work. Couldn’t even get to a desktop. I tried a bunch of different boot options (and yes, I tried “nomodeset”) and still it didn’t work.

Apparently, the latest bleeding edge Linux kernel doesn’t have ATI drivers that work with it. OK…why release a distro that won’t even work with a large number of graphics cards? That’s just strange to me.

I’ve downloaded Dreamlinux 3.5 instead. The LiveCD works perfectly and I’m installing it now, over a Linux Mint Elyssa installation, which was out of date. Review of Dreamlinux to come. (I still like Mint and I use it on my main computer.)

Thing is, I hate burning these CDs and then wasting them when they don’t work. A lot of useless techno-trash. I’ll give the Fedora CD to a friend who can hopefully use it.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Open Source, Technology Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Fedora 11 Linux + ATI = Not Happening”

  1. Pingus says:
    August 21, 2009 at 7:02 pm

    The xorg ati driver wouldn’t work? Does Fedora have the Radeon driver? What driver did Mint use?

  2. Tinfoil says:
    August 22, 2009 at 3:40 am

    It’s really a shame that lately there has been driver issues with Linux and Xorg. It would be nice if the distributions didn’t ship with broken drivers. Distributions that ship always with the latest and greatest, like Fedora, may end up having issues from upstream and suffer from lack of proper testing.

    When I started playing with Linux, I burned new versions of different Linux distributions to CDs, but it’s not a great idea in the long run. Nowadays I just use rewritable DVDs and occasionally usb-drives to install the distros I want to try out or use. Using a rolling release distro or sticking with a distribution that supports upgrading to newer versions without burning a new installation media is also an option.

  3. Ray says:
    August 22, 2009 at 12:21 pm

    Hi!
    Which ATI device do you have?
    I’m with a Mobility Radeon X1300 and is working with full 3d acceleration. The driver radeon was automagically set by Fedora installer.

  4. jemimah says:
    August 26, 2009 at 11:39 am

    You should check out the unetbootin tool to burn ISOs to usb sticks. http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

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